A democracy tipping over the edge

From the Volokh conspiracy: Harsh criticism of religion outlawed.  It seems that in Austria Australia, speech that disparages a religion or a group of people is now punishable by law. 

Is this where we’re headed if we can’t overcome our reluctance to offend people?  This is an amazingly, astoundingly, incredibly bad, very awful idea.  And NOW would be an excellent, very appropriate time to stop and reconsider the real consequences to democracy of political correctness.

Posted by George on 03/02/05 at 04:50 PM
Issues • News • (4) Comments • Link

Predestination limerick

This update of an old limrick from a New Scientist reader tickled my funny bone, so I thought I’d share it with you:

There was a young man who said,
“Damn!
I now understand that I am
A being that moves
In predestinate grooves,
Not a car, not a bus, but a tram”

...and Alan Worsley’s reply:

The young fellow then thought,
“No,
It is not necessarily so,
The argument fails,
I can lay my own rails,
And go where I want to go.”

Posted by George on 03/01/05 at 10:40 PM
Humor • (1) Comments • Link

Laughing off the end of the world

Instead of watching the Oscars (boring speeches) I went to the Historic Normal Theater and watched Kubrik’s classic, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, James Earl Jones, et. al.

What a roar that movie is.  And full of Kubrik’s trademark detail and perfection.  You can’t help but admire the competence and sheer heroism of the bomber crew, and you root for them even though you know that if they reach their target, the whole world will be destroyed. 

Sellers, Hayden, Scott and Pickens are absolute genius.  How can I recommend this movie enough?  OK, it isn’t as cheerful as My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins which both came out the same year, but I like dark humor.

Note to self: rent The Mouse That Roared from 1959.  I barely remember it but I do recall that it was very funny and starred Peter Sellers.  A small country declares war on the US hoping to surrender and then reap a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding.  (Except… one of their scientists spoils their plan by inventing a superweapon, hilariously named the “Q-bomb” and shaped like a football…)

Posted by George on 02/27/05 at 08:56 PM
Reviews • (5) Comments • Link

Bill Gates gives educators a clue

“America’s high schools are obsolete.  By ‘obsolete,’ I don’t just mean that they’re broken, flawed, or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points.  By obsolete, I mean our high schools - even when they’re working as designed - cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”
- Bill Gates at the National Education Summit in Washington D.C. Feb ‘05

I wish the newspaper would have included the complete text of Gates’ comments, which I could not find.  What is it kids need to know?  Quadratic equations?  The capital city of Pakistan?  What?

I’m convinced kids need to know how to fail…

Continued...

Posted by George on 02/27/05 at 02:52 PM
Education • (4) Comments • Link

More self-esteem

Something else I found while looking for something else was this article on Self-Esteem in schools on Photon Courier... which I now add to the links because he has some pretty nifty articles. 

Posted by George on 02/26/05 at 06:19 PM
Education • (0) Comments • Link

Bowl ‘o chips for the weekend

Bowl ‘O Chips for the weekend - betcha can’t eat just one…

  1. Science for… dummies
  2. “Science” scaring the hell out of the Public Interest
  3. How things change
  4. Evils of technology

A stream-of-consciousness collection of topics just for fun.  Click the “read more” link to munch away…

Continued...

Posted by George on 02/26/05 at 05:48 PM
Geeky • observations • (2) Comments • Link

And now an important message from Dirty Harry…

“Maybe I’m getting to the age when I’m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now.  You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends.  Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the right and the left.”
- Clint Eastwood, responding to the ruckus over his movie, Million Dollar Baby.

I don’t know if Eastwood reads blogs, but the blogosphere is full of the same kind of rhetoric - even some of my favorite blogs on both the right and the left.  The battlefield is obscured by smoke.  It really is important for radicals on both ends of the spectrum to listen to each other and try to understand.  Then at least:

  • We could talk more about ideas, and less about personalities,
  • try to agree on what the issue is,
  • seek out commonly agreed-upon facts, and
  • try to find the third way

Soon as you do that, you discover a surprising thing: your opponents are more complex than the cartoons you imagined them to be.  You also find out that you share a lot of affections but approach them differently.  The knowledge makes good construction material for building bridges. 

Or ramparts,  when that is necessary.  At least you can attack your opponent for their actual ideas and actions and not for motives you imagine them to have.  (Or even those of their political affiliates.)

Notes:
See also:  an excellent editorial by San Diego columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr., who says:

“Complexity is a good thing.  And it’s a shame you don’t see and hear more of it in our political debates.”

Posted by George on 02/26/05 at 10:50 AM
Geeky • Blogging • (1) Comments • Link

Nukes on

Over at Compfused… The Power of Nukes, showing some really clear footage of nukes going off and their ground-level effects.  Lots I’d never seen before.

But how geeky is this?  Onscreen there are superweapons going off and I keep thinking about how the movie cameras were built that could accurately record the expansion of a nuclear explosion when it’s the size of a house and moving at maybe 0.1c. If I remember correctly they used rotating prisms instead of mechanical shutters to achieve rates of 10,000 frames per second or so - just barely high enough.

On a related note, check out this exhaustive list of nuclear accidents from the 1940’s through today.  If it’s true that we learn from our mistakes, the nuclear industry should be just about perfect by now. wink  Of course, if you tote up the fatalities and areas rendered unfit for human habitation, the nuclear industry is hardly unique.  All industry has risks, like the rather nontrivial risk to our global climate from the carbon-fuels industry. 

The nuclear industry may have a solution to the carbon-fuels problem, though it’s kind of funny that this article in Wired magazine treats the Three Mile Island accident as if it were the only one that ever happened.  Thoughts, anyone?

Posted by George on 02/24/05 at 05:38 PM
Geeky • observations • (5) Comments • Link

Culture clash in the sky

Chicago Tribune reports in “Battle for the skies” that Boeing (which just moved its corporate HQ to the windy city) is reinventing itself as a systems integrator instead of an aircraft builder. They’re decentralizing, spreading risk and manufacturing capability all over the world.  The article is about how Boeing culture is being forcibly reinvented to counter Airbus competition. 

Especially compelling is an account of a meeting where Japanese consensus-based meeting style collided with American-style brainstorming.  Some excerpts:...

Continued...

Posted by George on 02/23/05 at 09:15 PM
business • News • (1) Comments • Link

Muons against terrorism

There’s an old joke that goes…

Boss:  “Nancy, get Kenner in here;  I’m going to fire him. All he ever does is sit back in his chair and look out the window!”
Nancy: “But boss, Kenner came up with all four of our most successful campaigns last year!”
Boss: (not skipping a beat)  “Well then, what are you waiting for?  Get someone up there to clean Kenner’s window for him!”

The curious scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory seem to be earning their keep.  It seems they’ve come up with a way to look right through trucks and shipping containers to detect nuclear bombs or radiation shielding.  They perform this important little trick using muons,  which are high-energy particles that constantly fall to Earth from outer space.  They pass right through most things but are deflected just a little by very dense materials like uranium, lead, or plutonium. 

You never know in advance when pure science will wind up turning into a useful technology.  The first time anyone detected “muons,” it must have seemed pretty esoteric and useless.  “What are those crazy scientists spending our money on, anyway?”  Now, it just might save entire cities by detecting a terrorist weapon.

Let’s get somebody out there to clean those scientists’ windows!

Posted by George on 02/23/05 at 07:05 PM
Science & Technology • News • (0) Comments • Link

With the right marketing…

Do we need any more proof that there’s a whole class of pretentious people with lots of money but no taste?  Ok, here’s some:  a 4-year-old girl named Marla Olmstead does abstract paintings, which sell for $15,000.

Her mother is an artist, so naturally the child wanted to play with brushes.  Take a look at her gallery and see what you think. 

It’s pretty obvious who’s the driving force here… BBC News Online reports that her family says they see “elements of Jackson Pollack in her work.”  Do they, now?  Hey, I think my kids are pretty great, too. 

But to tell the truth, I never got Pollack, and I can’t believe a 4-year old named her paintings, “Fire Already,” “Ode to Pollack,” “Triptonic,” or “Asian Sun.”  More believable are the ones named “dinosaur,” “Face,” and “Monster.”

I actually like some of her paintings.  If one of my kids had done them, I’d be pretty happy about it, too.  But I don’t know the right people (or have sufficiently exploitive instincts) to push my 4-year-old kid onto the international stage just because I could.

“Despite prompting from her father, a giggling Marla refused to talk to BBC News Online about her work.”

Posted by George on 02/22/05 at 09:46 PM
Art • News • (2) Comments • Link

Random thoughts

A few thoughts that flew into my head today:

  • Cats are mystified by all the moving we do.  All that activity, and so little cat food results from it!
  • Note to drivers:  judicious use of steering, brakes, throttle, and turn signals are far more effective than the horn for preventing collisions
  • We tell children, “Learning is fun!  Let’s stop lying to them.  Learning is work; and as entertainment, work is overrated.  But knowing is fun.
  • Political correctness is the new McCarthyism.  When the president of Harvard can’t express one unpopular thought during a long speech without his career being in jeopardy, what else would you call it?
  • Corrollary to previous point:  the woman who actually got “short of breath” and walked out at the offending sentence didn’t do the cause of equal rights any favors
  • Corrollary to previous corrollary:  philosophically speaking, if masculinism is garbage, what is feminism?
  • I’m kind of fond of humanism, myself

Shame on me…

Posted by George on 02/21/05 at 08:26 PM
Issues • News • (6) Comments • Link

Whatcha readin’? meme

Saw this over on Capitalist Pig vs. Socialist Swine.  It’s been making the rounds of my favorite blogs:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 123.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

The book is: How The World Was One, Beyond the global village, by Arthur C. Clarke. 

The sentence is: “Unfortunately, one cable could only carry a single conversation for such a distance and this made the project uneconomic.”

The meme says not to pick the “coolest” book but I did a little cherry-picking from those piled on my desk, which included (left to right)...

Continued...

Posted by George on 02/20/05 at 09:42 AM
Geeky • Blogging • Link

Hellfighters great g-rated fun

Back in 1968 when I first saw John Wayne’s Hellfighters in the theater,  I really liked it.  My enjoyment was piqued by the fact that the movie is more or less factual, based on the life of legendary oil-well fighter Red Adair (who was a technical consultant on the movie.)  The story was exciting and fun and I never forgot it.  A few years ago I tried to rent a copy to show my own kids, but none of the video stores had it.

Then last week I saw a copy on my boss’ desk and asked to borrow it.  I do believe I actually enjoyed it more the second time than the first.  Here’s a few points from the movie…

Continued...

Posted by George on 02/19/05 at 10:01 PM
Reviews • (3) Comments • Link

Who wants one?

Nicholas Negroponte (former director of the famed MIT Media Lab) is on about an idea that just might change the world in unpredictable ways - a $100 laptop computer for poor countries.

His idea is to make it wireless, use all solid-state memory (that is, no hard drive), an innovative projection-laser type screen, and a stripped-down version of Linux.  It shouldn’t be fussy about power, and it should be darn near indestructable.  He believes that remote villages will be able to set up a couple hot-spots and everyone will gather around with their laptops and connect the educational and economic resources of the rest of the world.

Hey Nicholas, a couple things you didn’t consider:

First, everyone I’ve told about this has said; “I want one.”  Every single person....
=-

Continued...

Posted by George on 02/17/05 at 07:44 PM
News • (6) Comments • Link
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